Sunday, 25 November 2007

Bush must go!

Waiting for the third season DVD of Battlestar Galactica to drop in price, I'm filling in with Rome, the plush HBO double season box set telling the epic story of Julius Caesar's rise to power.

Boy! There's a lot of pre-Christian debauchery we only saw alluded to in I, Claudius, including lashings of lashings, pervy sex (you know, with the woman on top) and gore galore.

It's educational, as well. Did you know that the Brazilian wax was invented in ancient Rome? Funny (or furry), as even into the 1970s women sported magnificent unshorn thatches you could knit into a sweater until the men's mags gave us something else to be neurotic about. But in Rome the women have the sweetest little zebra-stripe landing-strips of fuzz. We know this from the mandatory full-frontal bonkathon in every episode.

Guy-talk transcends time: Roman geezers discuss women and we learn that in those days skinny = unattractive. Yet here are the women all looking like supermodels in their size zero frames. I reckon the vomitorium got a good work-out for this series. It's not even as if the lads could pop out for a quick one with big healthy women as the brothel workers (ooh, doggy style) all look like they moonlight for Pan's People.

Fat birds with big bushes. Heaven forfend! Even the famously sophisticated HBO audiences may not be quite ready for that.

Kenneth Cranham gives it some class as Pompey Magnus much as Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren did in Bob Guccione's Caligula, starring a pop-eyed Malcolm McDowell. The 1970s audiences were pop-eyed, too, what with all the porny bits Bobby spliced into the movie when the talent wasn't looking. However, a deft cut spares Cranham the indignity of grunting over the teenage Octavia, foisted on him by her evil mother who is, aiming high but falling short thus far, not a patch on Sian Phillips's Livia.

Brutus is played as an upper class twit from the nobility who is destined to land the first regicidal blow in the defence of his class, while all the other characters are merging into mush at the moment.

I'm waiting to see if Mark Anthony's funeral speech is sullied for me by Splintered Sunrise'saudacious despoilage and whether I shall be seeing in my mind's eye the chief antagonists of Reespect and Respect Renewal.

"The Romans also disapproved of pubic hair; young girls began removing it as soon as the first hair appeared. They used tweezers, which they called the "volsella" as well as a kind of depilatory cream called the "philotrum" or "dropax" which was sometimes made with bryonia and foreshadowed modern depilatory creams. Waxing with resin or pitch was also used to depilate. Furthermore, the practice of pubic hair removal wasn't unique to Rome - it was practiced in even the most remote parts of the empire. Julius Caesar (101-44 BC) writes that, "The Britons shave every part of their body except their head and upper lip." It is reported that Poppaea, wife of the Roman Emperor Nero, used depilatory creams to remove unwanted body hair daily. At that time, the latest available creams included some wonderful ingredients like resin, pitch, white vine or ivy gum extract, ass' fat, she-goat's gall, bat's blood, and powdered viper."

John Ruskin had a shock, an utter shock to the system you know (as he pats his fevered brow with a napkin)when he was confronted with a nude Effie Ruskin on their wedding night who had....aarrghhh...perish the thought....pubic hair! It appalled him soooo much he decided not to have sex with the poor woman...

No wonder she ran off with the painter John Everett Millias...

Can I admit to having a secret liking for Guccione's Caligula? Probably to do with Malcolm McDowell....(sigh!)

The women in Calligula had average looking bodies (not a size 0 among them). Obv. historians missed the importance of size 0 and botox in Roman times...

And yeah, it was the porn industry who started the Brazilian/shaven haven look.

And yeah, it was the porn industry who started the Brazilian/shaven haven look.

To the great detriment of the porn industry, some might say. (Growing up in the 1970s, I've been marked for life by Playboy nudes... big hats, floral prints, floppy shoulder-length hair, mascara'd eyelashes, big googly eyes glancing shyly at the camera, dappled sunlight through the leaves... and a proper triangular bush. Now that's porn. These young people...)

A mate of mine is doing a PhD on men's relationship to mucky mags, internet sites and the like. He's resigned himself to be known as 'Dr Porn'.

Actually, there's plenty that can be written about body hair, esp from a socialist feminist perspective. I bet Bic, Gillette, etc. are over the moon now everyone takes blades to their most delicate parts.

Oppps, sorry comrade Phil BC.. i did indeed get me the Phils mixed up. I did wonder though knowing that Phil BC is a whippersnapper at 30....and obv. got my maths wrong (maths never my strongest subject....)

Anyway,Phil AD, growing up in the 1970s with 1970s porn.

All righty, I have got you two Phils sussed now....won't make a mistake.

Reaching for my Gnu

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